Re: Ideographic Conlangs

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nokta Kanto" <red5_2@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 2:38 AM
Subject: Ideographic Conlangs


> Hi.
>
> I'm new here, I've been looking through the archives a bit.  I've been
> working on an artistic conlang for a while, and mine seems to diverge
> quite
> radically from most of the constructed languages I've found.  It looks
> like most constructed languages start with phonology and grammar. My
> language is entirely written (the language has no associated sounds), is
> made of ideographs, and lays out words on the page according to their
> relationships rather than queueing them with prepositions and
> inflections to mark case. It is (approximately, since words are not in a
> true sequence) a VSO language. So far, I haven't found any conlangs like
> this. Does anyone here know of any similar conlangs?

        My main conlang is phonetic and grammatical, but it also has a
mostly-obsolete "formal" style of writing which is ideographic. These
"glyphs" can't be spoken, or even read, only interpreted, since the shape of
the lines, the auxiliary symbols, and the direction certain shapes seem to
be "moving in" are only supposed to make sense when taken as a whole. That
is, it's (supposed to be) a nonlinear representation of a whole concept.

        I've had a lot of trouble with it, because they take a long time to
draw, and the list of "mini-meanings" I have is small and I don't really
have the time to develop it, unless I come up with some systematic approach
for doing so. Also, it's hard to know how to space things out, you have to
sort of know what it's supposed to look like beforehand, otherwise I don't
have the room to construct it properly, and getting an "image" like that
becomes very difficult for an idea of any significant complexity.

         I have no idea what yours looks like or how it's made, so maybe
this isn't very helpful.

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